SubscribeBe organized. Or be mush.
August 25, 2009 at 8:01 p.m.
Talking to my colleague Dante Chinni today, he summed up my thinking on frameworks for reporting far better than I've been able to:
Without an organizing principal, all we're doing is throwing things out into the ether. It all becomes mush.
That's not an exact quote. We were in the middle of a long brainstorm and I wasn't keeping notes. But it's close enough.
Dante has been working on Patchwork Nation since its inception--it's all he does--and it shapes much of the way he looks at the news. It's his lens. When we ...
More on Frameworks for Reporting: Lessons from PolitiFact
August 3, 2009 at 1:31 a.m.
The Obameter is a key example of reporting within a framework: Journalists advance a broad story update by update, building a comprehensive database of knowledge about one subject.
In this case, the PolitiFact team developed a standard to measure the success of Barack Obama's presidency. It's not, by any stretch, the only standard, but it gives us one clear lens to use in evaluating the president's effectiveness.
A lesson from Patchwork Nation: Frameworks for Reporting
July 28, 2009 at 9:46 p.m.
In programming, frameworks help speed development by abstracting common tasks and letting us focus on things that matter. They make what's important interesting.
We can apply this approach to reporting as well, especially when we're collecting structured data and treating news as data points. Doing this means we don't have to start over with each new set of figures.
A few lessons learned from Patchwork Nation and other projects.
